Lower Waters/ Part I

Originally, the water(s) were unified. Only after they were separated did they realize that they were different. Whether their original unity or their actual division was their essential state doesn’t matter much. What matters is that they are now separate.

The ‘higher’ waters were allowed to remain in their original state, the state of presence, of fullness and an awareness of their original purpose. 

The ‘lower’ waters, however, were cast out and away from their original space. Thrown into the nothingness of the outside, these waters gather and form into the abyss. Banished and lost, the ‘lower’ waters confront the absence of the depths, murmuring, trying to remember their forgotten origins.

Within the depths of forgetting, there is an awakening. A movement from within when the ‘lower’ waters gaze at their own distance, a self-reflection that opens unto the rootlessness of the self. The ‘lower’ waters of the abyss begin to rumble. Murmuring, depth calling unto depth, seeking out their barred origin, they cry out. The inaudible cry of distance, the sigh born in the shadows of the abyss rises above, silenced by the same depths that give birth to the cry.

The separation of the water(s), the primordial split that separates above from below, presence from absence, enables the functioning of being. Without the division of the ‘lower’ waters from within the ‘higher’ waters, the potential of being would be foreclosed on in the inundation of water, the oceanic sense of unity that prevents the possibility of duplicity.

Once awakened, the desire of the ‘lower’ waters to ascend from her depths, the cry for the return to the never-present presence threatens to return the world to “water in water”, a return back to the beginning before the beginning where the saturation of presence denied even the whispers of absence.

For the sake of being, the ‘lower’ waters are held in abeyance, never overcoming the boundary placed between her and her source. Perpetually assaulting the border, the ‘lower’ waters surge forth from their abysmal depth only to retreat back into themselves in the face of the impenetrable limit.

Chained to their depth, the ‘lower’ waters seek out a crack, a fissure, a moment to burst free…